Integrating GIS and Maximal Covering Models to Determine Optimal Police Patrol Areas (original) (raw)

Determining optimal police patrol areas with maximal covering and backup covering location models

2010

Abstract This paper presents a new method for determining efficient spatial distributions of police patrol areas. This method employs a traditional maximal covering formulation and an innovative backup covering formulation to provide alternative optimal solutions to police decision makers, and to address the lack of objective quantitative methods for police area design in the literature or in practice.

Demonstrating The Analytical Utility of GIS for Police Operations

PsycEXTRA Dataset, 2013

Carbondale. Three modules or projects are discussed. The first involves a different manner for visualizing the distribution and change of crime and calls for service by altering the size and/or color of street segments according to their intensity of crime and/or calls for service. This is called the Safe Streets approach. The second involves two models for assessing, analyzing, and mapping Hazardous Space for police work. The third involves using GIS and non-police external data for analyzing the police response to Special Events or, in this example, a natural disaster like a flash flood. Caveats placed on the project by the P.I. were that all the techniques must be simple and easily understood by future users. Moreover, no exotic hardware or software must be used. Both must be standard off-the-self items or easily accessed through the Internet.

Optimizing Police Facility Locations Based on Cluster Analysis and the Maximal Covering Location Problem

Applied System Innovation

Planning and defining places for the installation of police facilities are fundamental to improving the public security service in the urban space. Geographic Information Systems connecting the spatial distribution of police occurrences, budgetary restrictions, and the maximum distance covered are state-of-the-art innovations addressing the need for preventive and responsive police management. The present work proposes a management information system to support the analysis and suggestion of potential police facility locations. The management information system is modeled using k-means for cluster analysis and the definition of candidate locations, and the maximal covering location problem is used to optimize the predefined locations. The proposed system allows the analysis of alternative locations and their impacts on public security. The application in Brazil demonstrates that it is possible to obtain an additional 22% gain in the coverage area of occurrences and an additional red...

Using geographical information systems to organize police patrol routes effectively by grouping hotspots of crash and crime data

Journal of Transport Geography, 2013

Applying Data-Driven Approaches to Crime and Traffic Safety (DDACTS) can help police departments allocate limited resources more efficiently. By focusing on hazardous areas, highly visible traffic law enforcement can reduce crime and crashes simultaneously. Most studies have focused on the reduction of crime and crashes after applying new patrol routes, but few have documented how to improve or change police dispatch time. The objective of this study was to compare the police dispatch time between two conditions: (1) Police patrol routes with organized hotspots; and (2) Police patrol route patterns without focusing on hotspots. A secondary objective consisted of developing a procedure describes the calculation of the change in dispatch time. This study used data obtained from the College Station Police Department. Crime and crash data were collected between January 2005 and September 2010, which included 65,461 offense reports and 14,712 crash reports. The proposed study procedure included four steps: (1) Geocoding data, (2) defining hotspots, (3) organizing the best patrol routes, and (4) estimating the effectiveness. ArcGIS was used for the data analysis. The results indicated that using DDACTS principles can potentially reduce police dispatch time by 13% and 17% when the top 5 and top 10 hotspot routes are included in the analysis, respectively. The procedure can be used by law enforcement agencies to estimate whether or not the DDACTS protocols can be an effective tool for reducing law enforcement dispatch times when crash and crime data are analyzed simultaneously.

GIS for Crime Analysis: Geography for Predictive Models

Electronic Journal of Information Systems Evaluation, 2012

The term crime analysis refers to a concept and to a discipline practiced in the policing community. It includes analysis of more than just a crime, which is why some authors refer to it as public safety analysis. However, over the last few years crime analysis has become a general term that includes a lot of research subcategories: intelligence analysis, criminal investigative analysis, tactical crime analysis, strategic crime analysis, operation analysis and administrative crime analysis. Crime mapping and spatial analysis complements all of them and plays a crucial role in defining new forms of representation and visualization to better understand crime and to respond adequately to the problem of criminality. A new worldwide socio-economical order lead to an increasing number on crime rates and raised the need to find new ways to handle information about criminality. To better understand its causes, local, regional and national security authorities turned to new decision support ...

A Gis-Based Analysis of Police Stations Distributions in Kano Metropolis

The paper examines the spatial distribution of police station in Kano Metropolis. Global Positioning System (GPS) was used to measure the coordinates (latitude and longitude) of the stations in the area, while the data pertaining to the number of police personnel in each station were sourced from interview and documented data sourced. The data were anlysed using simple and inferential statistics. Also ArcGIS 9.3(Version) Software was used to draw the map of the distribution. A nearest neighborhood analysis has shown that the distribution of stations is random in the area. One and two kilometer buffer zones were generated and the result shows that the old city of Kano and the eastern part of the metropolis were fully served while the west and southern part were underserved. The ratio of police officer to population in the area is 1: 539 in the area which is far below the United Nation recommended figure of 450. It was also discovered that there is neither significant relationships between the numbers of the station nor between the number personnel in the station and population in the area. The research recommends the needs for population consideration in citing station in the areas as one of the means for achieving better security situations.

Designing efficient and balanced police patrol districts on an urban street network

International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 2018

In police planning, a territory is often divided into several patrol districts with balanced workloads, in order to repress crime and provide better police service. Conventionally, in this districting problem, there is insufficient consideration of the impacts of street networks. In this study, we propose a street-network police districting problem (SNPDP) that explicitly uses streets as basic underlying units. This model defines the workload as a combination of different attributes and seeks an efficient and balanced design of districts. We also develop an efficient heuristic to generate high-quality districting plans in an acceptable time. The capability of the algorithm is demonstrated in comparison to an exact linear programming solver on simulated datasets. The SNPDP model is successfully implemented and tested in a case study in London, and the generated police districts have different characteristics that are consistent with the crime risk and land use distribution. Besides, we demonstrate that SNPDP is superior to an aggregation grid-based model regarding the solution quality. This model has the potential to generate streetbased districts with balanced workloads for other districting problems, such as school districting and health care districting.

The Use of Geographic Information Systems by Law Enforcement Agencies and Its Impact on Police Performance

2014

and Chair, Urban and Regional Studies Do we know whether the use of geographic information systems (GIS) in law enforcement agencies increases police performance? This study examines the impact of GIS use to police performance outcomes in cities and counties of the U.S. between 2000 and 2007. Current research uses computerized mapping conceptualization to operationalize its measurement. Second, the police performance methodological context is used to measure the organizational impact of GIS. Finally, a new theoretical framework, information technology capacity that combines organizational, environmental and managerial factors to explain IT applications, is used to encompass most relevant dimensions of the subject matter. Findings indicate that the use of GIS in police agencies increased sharply between 2003 and 2007. Additionally, the contribution of GIS use on police performance was found to be statistically significant, but in the opposite direction. Overall, results of the present study indicate significant links between crime rate (DV) and independent variables (IV) in law enforcement agencies. IVs are having a professional form of government andfull time specialized crime analysis personnel, police strength, the use of GIS, population, being located in the Northeast and West regions, poverty, having encouraged SARA type projects and a community policing unit.

The Police Vehicle Location-Allocation Problem

2000

The main aim of this research is to develop and apply location optimization formulations in conjunction with a geographic information system (GIS) to allocate police patrol vehicles such that the police car road coverage in a specific area is maximized. We will demonstrate this using a case study based on the interurban road network of Northern Israel. Currently it is